(Reuters) - Russian President Vladimir Putin, running for a new six-year term in an election that his opponents say is a parody of democracy, said on Tuesday that past U.S. elections had been rigged by postal voting.
“In the United States, previous elections were falsified through postal voting … they bought ballots for $10, filled them out, and threw them into mailboxes without any supervision from observers, and that’s it,” Putin said, without providing evidence.
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And watch MAGA eat this shit up.
Why would putin lie about such a thing? I’m going to blindly believe him since it confirms my existing beliefs.
I mean, he does know a thing or two about rigged elections.
I don’t know, technically killing your opponents isn’t really rigging the election.
Rigging an election is something subtle, and Putin doesn’t really do subtle. They don’t even bother to make their murders look like accidents anymore.
MAGA and tankies. I’d say strange bedfellows, but honestly, they’re not that different beyond what shade of red they prefer to be painted.
they’re not that different beyond what shade of red they prefer to be painted.
CCP Red or Kremlin Rouge
I prefer them in Ukrainian Missile Crimson
Cosplay communists.
No one who’s an actual communist would support Yeltsin and the Oligarchs’ friend Putin.
You’re discounting the many actual communists that are also actual idiots.
Idiots who truly believe in communism, but also think that the fascist Russian government and the equally repressive Chinese one are that.
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Is the tanky in the room with us right now?
Considering we’re on Lemmy? In all likelihood, yes.
Well, I gotta say that you’re the first person I’ve encountered that didn’t immediately feel shame for randomly bringing up a totally irrelevant political faction after that question. I suppose the next question is, what do you consider a tanky? Anyone left of democrats? Or do you have a more specific definition in mind?
Edit: downvote me all you want, but this is a legitimate question. I’m a type of anarchist that advocates for mutual aid, industrial unionism, and a complete decentralization of power. I’ve been called a tanky because I support tenant unions.
I’m literally standing in the position you described and no one has ever called me a tankie, if you think China and the USSR were/are positive forces for common people, want to accelerate the collapse of the US, and/or have Anakin Skywalker tendencies (“then they should be made to”) you’re a tankie. If not you most likely aren’t a tankie
Don’t bother. Tankies and their apologists don’t argue in good faith.
Lmao, so you’re calling me a tanky now, because I dared to ask a relevant question about your opinion?
Do you consider Michael Parenti a tanky?
Never heard of him so I couldn’t say one way or the other
Aren’t you tired of conversations like this? It doesn’t matter what label any of us use to describe our political views. We don’t have the power to implement them. Those that do don’t give a fuck what we think. We’re all just yelling at the perceived other while we watch things deteriorate.
Actually, I am. I’m sick of purity tests, infighting, and a disorganized left. That doesn’t mean that I don’t have any power. I have local power; we all do. I have tactical agreement with Democrats for a progressive future, that doesn’t make me a Democrat.
I can influence local politics to have a progressive local government. With enough people doing this in their local government, we influence regions and states to be more progressive and push the country forward to a more equitable and just society. My weapon of choice is organizing a union at my work. Once we win, I’m going to organize my apartment complex. Once we win, I’m going to organize my broader community.
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This 100%. The Russian propaganda to right wing talking heads pipeline is just so painfully obvious.
Elections have been rigged for a long, long time. Gerrymandering is absolutely insane. Cities with meandering sections cut off. Disadvantaged suburbs slammed into afluent areas across town to dilute the votes.
But not rigged in the way Putin and the Republicans claim. Rigged in ways that help them.
Just like all the claims the GOP makes now. If they claim we’re doing something it’s because they’re doing it.
Not. To say that there’s not Democratic gerrymandering as well, but when 80% of it leans red that 20% blue is more of a defensive posture than anything.
You could also have any political opponents thrown in jail or wait for them to fall out of a window. You don’t need to tamper with the system that way.
That sounds more Russia’s cup of tea
Rigged overlaps too much with the votes being fake. I think unjust and inequitable are better terms.
“In the United States, previous elections were falsified through postal voting … they bought ballots for $10, filled them out, and threw them into mailboxes without any supervision from observers, and that’s it,”
Problem - That’s not the way vote by mail works.
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You register to vote and place a signature on file.
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You get your ballot in the mail and vote.
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You put the ballot in the mailing envelope and sign the back of the envelope.
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When the ballot is returned, they compare the signature on the envelope with the signature on file, if it matches, the ballot is set aside for counting.
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If there’s a PROBLEM:
A) Missing signature
B) Signature doesn’t match
C) Ballot damaged or unreadable
D) Ballot already recorded as presentThe ballot gets returned to the voter for correction, assuming there’s enough time for it to be corrected.
What Putin describes wouldn’t work, because the fake ballots either wouldn’t have a signature, wouldn’t have a valid signature, or wouldn’t correspond to a registered voter.
Won’t matter, he is speaking directly to MAGAs, and they already believe that this is the truth
You know how the Nigerian prince scams intentionally use terrible English to filter out the stupid ones?
Half the people you come across are below average. Technology has made it exceptionally effective to target the dumb and vulnerable.
Plus no one is allowed to supervise your ballot entries.
The supervision is the signature comparison, just like in person voting where you’d go in, sign the register, and they’d compare that signature to the one on file.
“filled them out, and threw them into mailboxes without any supervision from observers” Where does that suggest it is the signature involved? The signature is compared before Voting when Voting in person and after the office receives it when Voting by Mail. It makes no sense that lil’ dictator pootie meant the signature in his statement.
Valid ballots have signatures matching the registered voter casting the ballot.
In Putin’s scenario, there are no signatures, the ballots are not associated with registered voters, and as such would be rejected at the polling location.
That is not involved in the supervision of filling them out nor posting them. Both those things happen before or after, not during.
Nobody supervises the filling out of ballots, that’s an entirely private matter.
The only supervision that happens is the comparing of signatures and that happens both at in person and vote by mail voting.
Which is indeed what I stated from the beginning. Well done catching up.
Bingo! Thank you for taking the time to write that up.
I fail to see why it would not work though? Instead of paying 10$ for an empty ballot from a registered voter you pay 10$ for an empty ballot from a registered voter and and their signed envelope?
Like I am not saying this happened, because 10$ ballot sales would probably have made the news around the election, I doubt 10$ buys silence. But like I fail to see how this is impossible?
You can’t get that done in enough bulk to sway the election without getting caught.
Of course, that was my point with 10$ doesn’t buy silence. Top comment simply seemed to imply that buying blank mail-in ballots is impossible which for sure doesn’t seem to be. I could even see some nut at least trying to buying say 5-10, but ironically I think a Trump supporter is more likely to try to pull this.
Obtaining blank ballots isn’t the trick, it’s obtaining blank ballots attached to valid, registered voters with a signature on file and matching the signature.
You’d have to do that by the thousands to flip an election and it would only take one person going “I already voted? What do you mean I already voted?” to rumble it.
Even if we just counted ballots with no verification, which we don’t, you’d end up with overcounts which we know did not happen. “Hey, this county only has 5,000 registered voters, how did we get 30,000 ballots?”
The point is you offer someone who registered for mail in to simply sell you their ballot along with a signed envelope. I would vager doing this for a few votes would be fairly easy. Certainly plenty of poor voters would easily sell a vote. Idk about 10, but for 20-50 bucks? For sure. I would imagine someone selling a vote would be less likely to come forward in some respect too, so if you target the right people, at some minor scale you would even get away with it no problem.
Yes this is obviously not happening, not at scale anyway, and certainly not enough to flip the election. But the idea that this is particularly hard in itself, let alone impossible, is absurd.
Oh, yeah, small scale voting fraud has always been a thing.
When we first set up vote by mail 23 years ago, Republican operatives got the bright idea to set up fake ballot drop off locations. The idea was go to Democratic heavy areas, collect the ballots, then just throw them away.
They were arrested. LOL.
Last election cycle there were multiple reports of people doing double voting for family members, they also got caught.
So when small scale stuff like this gets exposed and prosecuted, the idea that fraud on a scale big enough to turn an election would go un-noticed is just laughable.
A lie spreads worldwide before the truth contradicting it can be typed, unfortunately.
Just like Trump lies, Putin requires that there be no evidence to support his claims. Imagine if Trump actually tried to prove his claims with evidence… it would fail. Even if one ended up true that would be worse as then people would expect him to prove things with evidence in the future.
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Ah yes, a Putin, the bastion of honesty and truth.
Well, this one is a confession from him
Pot calling Kettle black, but he ain’t even wrong.
Not even getting into the Brooks Brothers Riots or Operation Eagle Eye or the straight explicit rigging of Jim Crow, the modern political class fully endorses rigging elections
Putin knows the US elections can be rigged because he’s had his hands on the levers of power. But he’s hardly unique in that regard. Certainly, not given how we’ve eviscerated the Voting Rights Act over the last twenty years.
Yes he IS wrong, what the fuck???
The brooks brothers riots had nothing to do with mail in voting, neither did any of the other examples you gave. If you’re going to say he’s right you need to qualify that since he specifically stated postal voting as the medium for rigging.
The brooks brothers riots had nothing to do with mail in voting
They very explicitly stopped a district from counting mailed in absentee ballots.
Right so why doesn’t he provide proof then? He’s absolutely motivated to provide it if he has it so the fact that he doesn’t have it basically proves he just making stuff up.
Right so why doesn’t he provide proof then?
I cited multiple examples with ample proof behind them.
Are you denying the Brooks Brothers Riot and Operation Eagle Eye happened? Or are you just upset that Putin isn’t enumerating them from his bully pulpit?
Lol see, this dude had facts to back up his claim but because what he said was something people dont want to hear he gets downvoted to zero. I notice that a lot on here. It’s part of the sewer that leaked over from Reddit.
Or maybe they simply worded their comment poorly. Yeah we have had elections stolen before but Putin is NOT right in stating that it was by way of mail in voting. Absolute bullshit on that.
we have had elections stolen before
Pretty gross how it took so long for you to admit this. Especially since this point is the entire essence of the article.
If you agree that American elections have previously been stolen then why are you disagreeing so emotionally with the post? If you admit that US democracy is a sham then why are you yelling at Putin rather than yelling at your own country’s lack of human rights?
Whoa there buddy. It ain’t a sham. Not yet anyways.
So weird that Trump and Putin have the exact same opinions. Do you think Trump is controlling Putin?
I wish.
President for life speaks about elections being a bad thing.
Putin dying will be a holiday.
I mean he should know since he was one of the people paying to influence the election.
Say it with me kids, Projection.
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phew I thought Russian elections were rigged too, glad to hear that is not the case, what a real relief
“by me lelelelelelelel” - Putin prolly
And he wouldn’t lie would he. Internationally known as being a reasonable person that he is.
God, what a stupid article, why the hell was this even reported? Oh never mind it’s Yahoo news, that’s why
Rhetoric of this sort just promotes distrust in election systems, which of course prompts demagogues like Trump to promise voters they can fix it if they gain power. The fun thing here is that the right here needs you to believe things that aren’t true in order to justify them doing a coup, the stupid thing is that stupid people take this kind of talk seriously.
But seriously, American voting is relatively secure- it’s just that where lawmakers don’t want voters deciding the ‘wrong’ way they’ve gerrymandered them into districts to prevent them doing it, and they’ve done things to strip voters of their voting rights and to suppress voting and to make it inconvenient or difficult to vote. This has been a bipartisan thing in the past, but today the GOP are the chief offenders.
Also, Putin’s Russia is in the stage of democracy where elections are an exercise in flaunting the death of democracy itself, and nobody should ever take his talk about elections as being in good faith, ever
There’s plenty of injustice in our voting system but it’s all out in the open. Seriously, why go through the tremendous amount of risk and effort needed to fake votes when there are plenty of ways to sway the election in broad daylight?
Protecting bitch, Putin rigs Russian elections and tried to rig ours again but failed. Fuck him
Projecting?
Always has been.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Electoral_College
Of course, if it was a popular vote, the parties would apply entirely different strategies in elections, so we cannot be sure what would’ve happened in the past if popular vote mattered.
Inequitable is different than rigged.
Ok, fair enough.
Okay, but when you factor gerrymandering of districts into the concept of the EC, now you have a rigged election.
I will grant that it is different. But is it meaningfully different? Either way, the people are not represented.
IMO the difference is it happening in the open. Rigged is too conflated with fraud so I don’t like using the same word as it doesn’t clearly capture the difference.
Fair enough. I’ll never argue against being specific and accurate!
I never really understood this. Why do an election when the electoral college decides who the winner is?
I’m not a US American.
The electoral college complicates things by having each state be its own separate popular vote.
Two states, Nebraska and Maine, will split their electoral votes based on their popular vote. But the rest of the states just give all their electoral votes to their popular vote winner.
The core issue is that a presidential candidate can win 50.1% of the vote in a state and will receive all electoral votes as if 100% of the state voted for him.
A secondary issue is that electoral votes aren’t equal. Each state has a minimum of three electoral votes. This creates a situation where Wyoming, a state who’s population is smaller than our capital Washington D.C., has more voting power per person per electoral vote than California; the most populous state.
Two states, Nebraska and Maine, will split their electoral votes based on their popular vote.
Only Maine splits their vote. Nebraska awards votes by congressional district, allowing the state to effectively gerrymander the electoral college.
Without proportional electors, in a close election where the swing states–the only states that matter–vote near 50-50, the outcome is essentially random. In the states that vote 50.1% for one candidate, 100% of the votes will go to one candidate, and in the states that vote 50.1% for the other candidate, 100% of the votes will go to that candidate. Random noise in how votes are aggregated, from the district level up, can theoretically lead to wildly unfair results. In the worst case, all voters in 49.9% of states (by elector count) vote for one candidate, and then all voters in 49.9% of the voting districts in the remaining states vote for the same candidate, but 50.1% of voters in the remaining districts vote for the other candidate, that other candidate’s ~25% of the popular vote becomes a majority and they win the election. The required popular vote percentage is even lower if you factor in how California voters are less than three fifths people (closer to one fifth than two fifths, even) compared to Wyoming.
Depending on how you count it, you only need 23-27% of the popular vote to win the electoral college. This scenario is very unlikely but it illustrates how skewed the electoral college can make our elections.
The original thinking was the electoral college could stop any truly disastrous votes. But we’ve seen how that goes! Now we’re stuck with it because it helps one party and would require a constitutional amendment to abolish, and too few people in power are interested in doing what’s right for the country - they’re interested in doing what’s right for their party.
(For another example of the “party first” mentality that has taken over: Washington, DC residents have no vote in Congress. This seems like an obvious thing to fix, give them a two members of the House and two Senators…but whoa, we can’t do that, it would change the balance of power in Congress! Seriously. That’s why DC residents have no real voice in Congress. For clarity, their votes do count for the Presidential election.)
Why do an election when the electoral college decides who the winner is?
The voters decide what the electoral college chooses, though. I suppose it has been a sort of buffer against the dumbfuck citizens making dumbfuck choices. Donald Trump’s presidency of course has shown that if any such buffer ever existed, it sure doesn’t now.
Historically, it was implemented because in the 1800’s, a lot could happen between an election in, say, Wisconsin, and the time the electoral college member arrives in Washington DC.
The US being the oldest democracy might have a nice ring to it, but realistically it’s just means that there’s a lot of outdated baggage attached.
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Not to mention that the economy is also typically better when a Democrat is the president.
This might be explained by the latency that large economic decisions have. As a practical example, the leftist government in Finland increased expenditure by quite a lot in Finland during 2019-2023 (mostly due to Covid-19 and Russia, but also beyond that) leading to a much increased governmental deficit. As a result, the economy is doing poorly now, and since the Finns chose a rightist austerity government in 2023, it looks as if the economy was doing well under a leftist government, and poorly under a rightist government – even though the consequences for the current situation can clearly be derived from the previous government and there’s no way the current government has had enough time contribute to the situation.
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I’m unfamiliar with the details of economics decisions in the US. How much does the president get to decide those things versus the House and Senate?
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That would make sense, but that’s not the law. In most states, the electors can vote differently and it still counts, and in only some of those states is it even illegal for the elector to do that.
It all goes back to slavery. The South has lower population and wouldn’t sign the constitution unless they had a handicap to ensure they were able to keep owning people. As more states entered the country the slavers got worried about the likelihood of slavery being made illegal. Look up Bleeding Kansas for more info.
Wrong compromise. That was the 3/5ths a person. This is large population states against small population states. States with small populations (including Southern but not exclusively) wanted a guarantee that it wouldn’t just be a parade of presidents from New York.
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Originally the electors were actually meant to deliberate. It was supposed to be a no party system.
In practice the electors have never demonstrated any independence from the political power that sent them there.
Then you have states having to figure out how they select those electors, under the eyes of voters. Back then the representative to voter ratio was a lot smaller so losing your seat was a lot easier. So they did the politically reasonable thing and made the electors an elected position.
It wasn’t long before that transformed into candidates selecting their electors, and people just selecting the candidate on the ballot.
So electoral college remains now as a compromise between large population states and small population states. And the backup. Which is supposed to be Congress voting by state, is similarly population balanced because they get one vote per state in that instance.
This all made a lot of sense in a semi-decentralized country that wasn’t supposed to have parties. Unfortunately parties formed literally right away. Also, since the Civil War we’ve been a lot more centralized. But we’re stuck with old voting systems because if we held a Constitutional Convention to update it then the Republicans would do stupid shit.
if it was a popular vote, the parties would apply entirely different strategies in elections,
Sure. Strategies would change to appeal to popular opinion rather than focusing forever on maximizing campaign contributions.
And speeches along the campaign trail would focus on broadly important topics instead of being individually tailored to the concerns of a few key districts that can swing entire states
Might be nice to revisit that whole “benefits of Open Medicare Enrollment” rather than going a full six months hovering around the Iowa Fair grounds and fixating exclusively on corn and soy futures.
If our democracy ever got that functional, how would we fund our billionaire oligarch daddies?
